Protecting Your Coda Saved Sites

06/04/2009

Somewhat randomly, after a hard crash on my system, I opened up Coda to find that it was unregistered and all my saved sites were gone. I wasn’t too happy about it, since there were probably 20 in there that I would have to dig through all kinds of old emails again to dig up the info, if I was even able to.

As it turns out, there is pretty much one file responsible for this: com.panic.Coda.plist – which is located at ~User~/Library/Preferences. Apparently it got lost or corrupted somehow. I was using Time Machine, so I should have been able to just notch back in time a little and grab an old copy. [Long unimportant story], I was unable to do that at the current time.

Thanks to a nice little Facebook conversation with Rahul Bansal, I have some tips to share to prevent it from happening again.

Make sure your backup system backs up your Preference files. Should something go wrong, grab an old copy and replace it.

If you happen to be a Transmit owner as well, you should make sure to first add all your sites to Transmit. Coda can import favorites from Transmit, but Transmit can’t import favorites from Coda. So if Coda goes a-foul, you’ll be able to snag them from Transmit easily.

Never let your computer crash ever.

There is a secondary awesome feature of using Transmit as your master-source for all saved sites. Transmit syncs with .Mac. So if you have .Mac, all your computers will have the same saved sites on them in Transmit. When I first got my laptop, I was bewildered how it automatically knew all my saved sites, but this is clearly why. For the record, I have since stopped using .Mac because I think it’s over-priced and under-valued.

@B. Ackles
Many freelancers need to save FTP details of their clients. I have more than 60 sites in my coda. Around 50 of them for clients.

Version control is good for projects running on your server. Most clients do not have shell access on their cheap web host. So even if you develop client project with SVN (or GitHub) you can not check-out with FTP-only on clients server.

Backing up to S3 might be a better solution than .mac, which I agree is way over priced. I’m not using either (.mac or s3). However, as my client load increases, I realize I’ll probably want to do more than simply backing up to my external hard drive. Also, my external hard drive is not always available & s3 is ubiquitous.

That’s a good question, about the differences between Transmit and Coda. For the truly cost-conscience, I’d say there isn’t any HUGE reasons to own both.

If you KNOW all you need is a FTP client, then Transmit is right for you I think. And it does offer some features that are compelling like the .mac syncing and Amazon S3 support. Also for transferring large amounts of files, I feel better using Transmit and queuing up all the stuff that needs to go and watching the queue. Coda doesn’t have a queue really.